This blog is written by staff writers who come from a consortium 14 of major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions around the world. These institutions have joined forces to form the Biodiversity Heritage Library, a digital library providing open free access to digitized texts from the taxonomic corpus. Participating libraries include Harvard's University's Ernst Mayr Library, Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and the California Academy of Sciences, just to name a few. They have over two million volumes of biodiversity literature, collected over 200 years to support the work of scientists, researchers, and students in their home institutions and throughout the world.

This is a blog about sexy groupers going on a honeymoon.
The honeymoon, a reef fish spawning aggregation, is one of the most breathtaking shows in nature.
Once a year, most reef fishes aggregate at only a few sites of the reef to spawn. Spawning is linked to the moon cycle.
Hundreds to thousands of fish (depending on the species) swim in a synchronized ballet under a moonlit ocean, until males and females spawn en masse, releasing the next generation of baby fish into the ocean currents.
Worldwide, 80 % of known reef fish spawning aggregations are overfished, and 20 % of them have been fished to extinction.
This blog focuses on research and conservation of reef fish spawning aggregations, specially those of large-bodied groupers.
Other topics on marine conservation will also be explained.

The title of this blog, Living Alongside Wildlife, is a reference to a land ethic suggesting human and wildlife populations can coexist if we respect our natural resources. Our goals should include living alongside wildlife in perpetuity, rather than unsustainable exploitation, wanton killing and irreversible destruction of their habitats. For more about conservation and land ethics, check out the work of Aldo Leopold, particularly A Sand County Almanac. These essays were a great influence in formulating my own stances on various environmental issues.
When I created this blog I had two primary goals. The first of which was to encourage an appreciation for wildlife that tend to have a bad reputation, primarily amphibians and reptiles. The second goal was to make my research accessible to a general audience. Over time, a third goal manifested itself. Many are generally unfamiliar with the natural history of reptiles; as a result there are a plethora of e-mail forwards containing outlandish stories and photos of these animals. All too often, these e-mails are circulated and accepted as fact. For animals that are already maligned, scary and fabricated stories only serve to perpetuate the myth they are dangerous and malevolent. Perhaps this is no more true than in the case of the giant dead rattlesnakes, wherein a dead rattlesnake is shoved towards the camera and a bogus story is made up about how various townsfolk were saved in the nick of time by the marauding monster. I use this blog to discuss these e-mail forwards, which I\'m often able to debunk based solely on the biology of the organism in question.

I'm currently a PhD student investigating how New Zealand community groups use science-based protocols to measure the success of their environmental restoration projects ("grassroots citizen science"). This opens a whole range of questions around how communities can participate more effectively in wider environmental decision-making.

I am a graduate student at Columbia E3B, a science educator with the NYC Schools and an aspiring urban ecologist. I use this space to share my research interests and outreach projects to increase public engagement in science.

Founded in 2008, Southern Fried Science is a blog by some marine science graduate students in the Carolina’s who love the ocean, science, conservation, philosophy, education, debate, and controversy. We talk about whatever topics catch our interest at the moment and believe that nothing is so sacred it cannot be criticized.

Latest Posts

Ericksonian hypnosis, also known as therapeutic hypnosis, remains a mystery for many people and is sometimes misunderstood. Uninformed assumptions has followed the hypnotherapist profession from the beginning, inherited from stage shows and dramatizations where a hypnotist seems to have unlimited powers, able to take control of individuals, bending them to their will … READ MORE

I really loved the Brain Blitz presentations we did last week because they brought up a lot of questions I had never really thought of before. I was particularly struck by the question: How are personalities shown in and influenced in the brain? There are many different ways we can evaluate and measure personality, and one […]

What do the U.S. Secretary of State, a European Prince, a French born scientist working in Canada and an Australian who’s been swimming with sharks since she was 12 all have in common? They are all winners of the 8th annual Peter Benchley Ocean Awards, the world’s preeminent ocean honors named after the late author…